The birth of Manchester Sacred Harp

As Manchester Sacred Harp hosts its fifth All-Day singing, Hannah Land recalls the events which led to her founding the group in 2012:

I don’t think I can recall a time where I didn’t know about shape note music and singing.  It feels so innate to me.  I’ve been singing the songs since childhood in the late 1980s and 90s.  My parents were avid folk singers, running folk clubs in Nottingham.  They hosted a range of guests and performers, including a choir from Vermont called the Bayley Hazen Singers, who would later morph into Northern Harmony and Village Harmony – all led by Larry Gordon.  My parents and others around the UK staged concerts with Larry’s youth choirs, and we had workshops singing shape note songs from the Northern Harmony and other music that they performed. 

When the Denson Sacred Harp was revised in 1991, my family were sent a copy.  I still have that book – signed by Molly Andrews, who sent it our way.  Choirs formed to sing West Gallery and shapenote music, though we didn’t understand the point of the shapes and the solfage system until the mid-late 90s.  We struggled at times.

Having grown up in Nottingham and trained at Coventry University, I moved to Oldham in 2004.  At the time there were only a few all day Sacred Harp singings and conventions across the UK.  

The Transpennine singing began in 2008, with people from Sheffield, West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester who wanted to sing regularly. We sang on the first Friday of the month, alternating between my home in Oldham, and other homes in Sheffield. But this arrangement fizzled out after a couple of years, though we’d occasionally sing in people’s homes around West Yorkshire.  

What did keep going was an all day singing at Oldham Baptist Church, which started in 2009 and continued each year, on the Saturday before the first Sunday in February, until 2016, when I returned to Nottingham. It welcomed singers from around the UK, USA and Europe.  

In 2010/11, I learned of a small group of friends, including Mika, who were singing at their homes in Manchester.  I was very happy to join in, help them sing and supply loaner books.  But some of them moved away, and there weren’t enough folks to keep it going.  

By this time, there were Sacred Harp communities in Bristol, Leeds, London, Newcastle and other places, singing monthly or weekly. So I tried organising some Manchester monthly evening singings, at Oldham Baptist Church and my home. We held singing schools and watched the film Awake, My Soul. It proved difficult to get enough people together, however, and I suspected a venue in the city centre would attract more singers.

In the summer of 2012, I attended Camp Fasola in Alabama and returned determined to find a city centre venue for a monthly singing.  And in September 2012 Manchester Sacred Harp was born.  

We met on the first Monday of the month at Sacred Trinity Church in Salford, and shared some food before singing, usually pizza.  I introduced the tradition of opening with 49b Mear, which is easy to sing and sounds nice even if you haven’t got all four parts.

With regular singing schools and other singings, people came and went and came again – Mika, Calum, Liz, Andy, Josh, Tom, Rachel and more – and a Facebook page was launched.  The group continued meeting at the church until around 2018, then moved to the nearby Kings Arms pub.  I was back in Nottingham by then, but sometimes visited to help.  

In 2015, I had been approached by Super Slow Way and visual artist Suzanne Lacy to organise shapenote singing at Brierfield in Lancashire, as part of a project called Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope.  They were to shoot a film the following year, which became known as The Circle and the Square; Suzanne wanted to use shapenote singing (The Square) and Sufi Muslim chanting (The Circle) to bring the local white and British Pakistani communities together.  It became apparent to me that there weren’t enough local singers to make it work, so I drafted in shapenote singers from other parts of the UK to help, but on the day we filmed in the mill, in September 2016, we were joined by members of the local community.  That film has been shown in galleries around the world and featured in a BBC documentary, and some of the locals joined the Manchester singings.

Meanwhile, Manchester Folk Festival hosted some workshops in 2017 and 2018, which brought more people to the monthly gatherings at the Kings Arms.  

The First Manchester All Day Singing was on 2nd November 2019 at Birch Community Centre.  It was a great day of singing, and we looked forward to many more to come… Then Covid-19 hit the world and everything ground to a halt.

As life began to get going again in 2021, Suzanne Lacy’s work, including The Circle and the Square, was exhibited at the Whitworth Art Gallery, with a group (mostly from Manchester) singing Sacred Harp at the launch – the first UK singing post-Covid.  That led to the arrangement for Manchester Sacred Harp to sing at the gallery every month – what a treat! 

From those early small shoots, a wonderful community of singers has grown, coming from the UK and beyond to sing at the Whitworth, as well as the Kings Arms. In the last few years, we’ve been invited to sing in various places around the city and at folk festivals.  Most notable was the fantastic opportunity to join Laurie Anderson and her band in the show ARK – you can read all about that in John’s post.  And in 2026, Manchester will host the UK Sacred Harp Convention.

I pinch myself at the opportunities that have come with Manchester Sacred Harp Singing – all from those fleeting beginnings some 20 years ago.

• Contributor: Hannah Land

Hannah Land is a life-long Sacred Harp singer, one of a handful from the UK.  Now living and working in Nottingham, she helped establish singing in Greater Manchester and continues to support our community.